Calendar of Events

Community Lecture Series: "Challenges and Opportunities of the Contemporary Arctic"

February 5,
201512:30 PM – 1:30 PMMoulton Union, Main Lounge

Join Susan Kaplan, director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, and Genevieve LeMoine, curator of the Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, as they discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of the contemporary Arctic.

Community Lectures include time for questions from the audience. Arrive at noon with a bag lunch. Beverages and cookies provided.

The lectures are free and open to the public. Questions? Call 207-725-3253.

Are you curious about the broad field of environmental
consulting? Alumni from large and small consulting firms will come and
share their insights, advice and experience about the numerous career paths in
environmental consulting.

Andreas Muenchow: "The American Passage to the North Pole: Ice, Oceans, Glaciers, and Climates of Nares Strait"

February 19,
20157:00 PM – 8:00 PMMoulton Union, Main Lounge

Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and
engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and
Environment, is a sea-going oceanographer interested in how physics of
polar and coastal oceans impacts global climate. He will discuss the
work he and colleagues did between 2003 through 2012 to understand the
physics of water and ice movement in Nares Strait, using icebreakers,
remote sensors, computers, and innovative engineering to collect and
analyze data on the ice, the water, and the air.

Nares Strait is the narrow passage between Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island. Few people realize that it carries as much water from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean as the much wider Fram Strait between Greenland and the Svalbard Islands to the east. Understanding the dynamics of ice and water transport through this strait is crucial to developing accurate models of current and future Arctic Ice and climate.

Narratives of polar voyages enjoyed wide circulation in Anglo-American cultural and political spheres during the long nineteenth century. Yet the familiar travel accounts of adventurous voyage and their fictional counterparts were not the only forms of literary production generated by Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Many expeditions brought a surprising piece of equipment aboard ship: a printing press. With such presses, polar-voyaging sailors wrote and printed newspapers, broadsides, plays, and other reading matter beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; these publications were produced almost exclusively for a reading audience comprised of the expedition’s crew members.

In this presentation, Hester Blum, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, will examine the first printed polar newspapers. What does this drive toward what she calls “extreme printing” tell us about the state of print culture and coterie publication in the nineteenth century Anglo-American world? Her talk will be attentive to the rhetorical distance between mass-published voyage accounts, and the coterie publications produced and circulated aboard ship. 'Polar Imprints' is attuned to the tension between the global ambitions of polar voyages, and the remarkably circumscribed conditions of their practice.

Sponsored by Africana Studies, Arctic Studies, and the English Department.

David Bruce was a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson fellowship during the 2012 through 2013 academic year. The exhibition Cities at Sea is the visual journal of drawings, paintings, and sketches that document his fellowship experience, during which he traveled to the Netherlands, Argentina, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Singapore to investigate what densely populated coastal cities are doing to adapt to the water-related threats of climate change.

Cities at Sea will run from Monday, March 2 through Sunday, March 29, 2015 in the Edwards Center Main Gallery. There will be a reception and artist talk following opening day in the Edwards Digital Media Lab at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 3.

This event is sponsored by the Departments of Visual Art and Environmental Studies and is free and open to the public.

Film Screening: 'The Auschwitz Gateway Film' with Filmmaker David Conover

March 25,
20157:00 PM – 9:00 PMVisual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium

Filmmaker David Conover will screen his recently-produced eight-minute film created for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum near Krakow, Poland.

The Auschwitz Gateway Film is a compelling and heartbreaking introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust at the largest concentration camp of the Nazi era, and will be shown to museum visitors before they walk through the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei ("work makes you free") gateway to enter the camp.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Conover and Professor of English and Cinema Studies, Aviva Briefel.

Free and open to the public. No tickets required.Call 725-3552 or email lholland@bowdoin.edu for more information.

Stacy Vandeveer: "Climate Politics Are Everywhere! Hope and Change in Transnational, National, and Local Spaces"

April 6,
20157:00 PM – 9:00 PMMoulton Union, Lancaster Lounge

The world of climate politics is increasingly no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides.

In this presentation, Stacy Vandeveer will examine the world of climate change governance and the implications for the field of global environmental politics. He is currently professor of political science and chair of the department of political science at the University of New Hampshire. His teaching and research interests include international environmental policymaking and its domestic impacts, comparative environmental politics, connections between environmental and security issues, the roles of expertise in policy making and the global politics of consumption and environmental and humanitarian degradation.

In addition to authoring and co-authoring over seventy articles, book chapters, working papers and reports, he co-edited six books: Comparative Environmental Politics (MIT Press 2012); The Global Environment: Institutions, Law and Policy (CQ Press 2010); Changing Climates in North American Politics (MIT Press 2009); Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics (Ashgate 2009); EU Enlargement and the Environment (Routledge 2005); and Saving the Seas (1997). He co-edits the journal Global Environmental Politics (MIT Press).

Jessica Lefevre and the Arctic Marine Mammal Coalition: "Modern Ecological, Political, and Social Change in the Alaskan Arctic"

April 9,
20157:00 PM – 8:00 PMMoulton Union, Main Lounge

Have you ever wondered what it is like to watch major portions of the coast on which you depend destroyed by massive storms, discover that waters from which you make a living are becoming an international shipping route, and observe that the marine mammals on which you depend are suddenly acting strangely?

Jessica Lefevre is an attorney who specializes in natural resources issues and serves as counsel and advisor to Alaskan indigenous groups. She will be joined by seven Yup'ik and Inupiat hunters and leaders representing the Arctic Marine Mammal Coalition. These Alaskan maritime hunting groups are on the front lines of climate change and globalization. They will discuss what it is like to live through rapid social, economic, and legal transition and how they are responding to challenges to their environment and way of life.